Is this papers or abstracts?
In February 2017, I began a project called The Horror of the Gaze, in which I used the Chinses selfie program Meitu to “cutify” nearly 100 artists, scholars and curators from around the world. These “Cute” versions of my community began to circulate, and questions of privacy, control of personal images, colonialism, and the politics of “whiteness” arose. In Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai discusses the mediation of the “Zany” and “Cute” and “Interesting” as obfuscating affective issues of hypercommodification, colonialization, and stereotyping. Each obscures hidden agendas of objectification and hidden anger.As with the Japanese artist Takeshi Murakami whose smiling “Mr DOB” is a post-nuclear nationalistic reappropriation of Mickey Mouse, “cuteness” is often a scrim for other, darker agendas. In the case of Meitu, it is a double signifier for the Asian perception of paleness, and cuteness, which are distinctly different from the Western perceptions of the aesthetics used in the app (paleness, large, watering eyes, pronounced lips). It is important to consider the conflation of racial and cultural tropes in play by the use of these apps.How does one culture’s digital selfie filters map onto others?Gayatri Spivak, in the Translation Studies Reader, states that accuracy in translation requires affect for the subject, and do these modes of production have these qualities? Grusin and Bolter in their seminal book reMediation, describe the agendas that are imposed by passing through the computer. And lastly, if McLuhan’s adage of the medium being the message is true, what can we ascertain is being said by Meitu remediations of cultural identity?
In this talk, I wish to deconstruct the affect of cuteness in the augmentation of selfie apps for cell phones like Meitu (China) and Snapchat (USA).Examples under consideration will include notable augmented Snapchat selfies, and my project, Horror of the Gaze, which includes nearly 100 New Media art celebrities, detournements of famous despots and remediations of glamour models to test aesthetic amplification. Also, if implemented, I will discuss the installation of “Make Karachi Cute Again”, a Facebook-based installation in which I will ask members of the Karachi community to submit their portraits for “cutification” by Chinese workers using the Meitu app and placing it back online.What is most interesting in all these cases is the remapping of affect through these transformation and their amplification or draining of meaning.
_______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
